


The Lucky Ones

by MakeMeYourFantasy



Category: The Hour
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 07:10:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakeMeYourFantasy/pseuds/MakeMeYourFantasy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS FOR SERIES TWO!!</p>
<p>Lix and Randall discover Sophia has survived the war and they meet her in the most unexpected set of circumstances.<br/>Will she survive these circumstances?<br/>Will they be "The Lucky Ones"?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am not Abi Morgan. I do not own "The Hour", but I claim part ownership of Sophia. Took some canon, tossed it around, let's see if it makes salad.  
> I thought the use of some French dialogue would lend character to the story. Plug into translator if you wish.  
> Hat tip to a "friend" for the title, a song by Lana Del Rey.  
> This is my first fic, so be gentle or abuse me :)

The Lucky Ones  
“Every now and then the stars align.  
Boy and girl meet by the great design.  
Could it be that you and me are the lucky ones?”—Lana Del Rey

Chapter 1

“I will not apologize. I offer no regrets and I will not talk about the past. Whatever game you are playing, I simply do not know why you’re here. For God’s sake, Randall, what insane way could you possibly think it was a good idea for you to come here, to work here?”

From the moment Randall had walked into Lime Grove Studios, Lix was absolutely sure that it would end in disaster. “The Hour” was a success in its second year. It was truly “the hour you could not miss.” The times were changing, the world was in turmoil and controversy, and they were covering it all. The team was brilliant. Well, with the exception of Hector, who while he had tremendous potential, was prone to self-destruction.

For the first time, in what seemed a like a very long time, Lix felt she had found her niche…again. She had realized that she didn’t need to be on the front line of a war to tell a story. Working the foreign desk brought to bear all of her skills as a gifted journalist. She was the wise, old sage in the team of idealists and she liked to think that idealism was wearing off on her. Things were possible...beyond a camera lens.

Lix knew what none of them knew. Randall’s arrival had the potential to bring the whole thing down in flames.

As hard as she tried to contain her feelings, they seemed to be seeping from her pores. Lix and Randall had something…some kind of history. First Hector had inquired and she had deflected. But she found it more difficult to lie to Bel.

“When Hector inquired as to how well I knew Mr. Brown, I said, ‘Not at all.’ Please don’t make me lie to you as well.”

*****

He lurked about her, treading lightly around corners, walking on eggshells, catching her off-guard. Lix counted the days until he would make his move. She didn’t have to count very long. They were in his office, his immaculate, obsessive compulsively organized office. He exerted control over objects because he had failed to exert control over his own life. But now he was about to make a play to change that.

“Do you ever wake up at four in the morning…?”

Of course she did. But she had managed to dull her feelings it with whiskey and work for so many years that she had been successful in diluting the past as if it never existed.

Almost.

Randall wanted something from her that she had literally kept buried in a box in the deep recesses of her life. He might as well have been trying to rip her heart from her chest. For as much as she had buried it, she was equally as reluctant to surrender it. To surrender it to him would be admitting the failure she had refused to make no apologies for.

“I need her birth certificate.”

Lix’s blood boiled and a noticeable flush rushed to her cheeks. Her anger silently swelled. How dare he, after all these years? How dare he try to coopt her silent suffering. After all, he hadn’t been the one forced to make the choice. In fairness, she’d never given him the opportunity.

She slammed the door of his office and stormed down the corridor.

*****

It was raining. It was London. She wouldn’t have given the sound of the drops against her window pane a second thought. But tonight, it made Lix think about another rainy evening. There had been tears in her eyes then too.

She rarely slept at her flat. In fact, the record that was playing had been on the player since the last time she had been there.

Edith Piaf, “La Vie En Rose”.

“Il me l’a dit, l’a juré pour la vie”

Now it just seemed bitterly ironic.

She reached from the couch to the coffee table and her hand found a nearly empty pack of cigarettes. It matched the nearly empty bottle of whisky beside it.

She lit the cigarette and exhaled deeply. Stretched out on the couch, she gently rested a hand over her eyes and closed them.

It haunted her. It had been an hour’s drive back to Paris, with the rain falling steadily and the wipers streaking across the windshield. She had to drive back without her…her precious baby girl not in the basket beside her on the seat. She had left a piece of her soul behind and the farther she had driven, the more it ached.  
It ached now. But what was done was done. She could’ve told Randall. But what kind of father would he have been? What kind of parents would they have been? The only thing they were good at was chasing war, gaping at human tragedy, and then killing the pain with sex and booze. She’d loved Randall and there was no question Sophia had been made out of love. But what kind of parents would they have made for a little girl who deserved the best of the world and not the seedy underbelly that they saw every day.

What kind of parents? She had never given them the chance to figure it out.

She opened her eyes and stared at the smoke curling towards the ceiling. The record she had been listening to had long stopped and the needle was skipping. She looked over at the clock.

Damn him.

It was four o’clock in the morning. Yes, she was awake at four o’clock. Wherever he was, he probably was too.

Lix sat up and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. She poured the rest of the bottle into her glass and downed it in one gulp. She slammed the glass down on the table. There wasn’t enough whisky to fill the space in her soul her baby had vacated. She’d tried for too many years. Randall had waltzed back into her life again. She wasn’t much for believing in God, but there was a reason he was here, now, at this time and place.

Lix walked into the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of her bureau. She took a deep breath, reached to the back and pulled out a manila envelope. It was what he wanted, but she couldn’t bear to look at its contents, not tonight. Instead, she ran her fingers over her handwriting on its outside.

Sophia Malfrand

The next morning, summoning all of her courage, she cornered him in the hallway and handed him the envelope. He started to open it, but she put her hand over his.

“I want to know, OK? I want to know,” she said as she walked away.

*****

They had a news program to put on every week. Hector’s arrest had touched off the spark of an investigation into police corruption and vice and every day, everyone around the world was living in fear that nuclear bombs would soon be raining from the sky. The team scurried around the newsroom and out in the streets putting together the stories for their one precious hour of airtime per week. Lix and Randall fell into place amongst them, cogs in the wheel, and members of the team. But one thing about Lix and Randall, they had excellent poker faces and kept their cards close to their chests.

Nowhere in their wildest imaginings would they ever have believed that they would become part of the story.


	2. Chapter 2

Lix enjoyed working the foreign desk. After all of her years at the front lines of war, it still gave her a connection to that world. The adrenaline was gone. The adrenaline had disappeared from most things. She viewed events with cynical pragmatism. But the nuclear crisis was shaking that pragmatism. As she stared at the map of Europe on her wall, with all of its crisscrossing lines, she could not stop herself from wondering if Sophia was out there somewhere, in the fallout zone. Would her efforts to protect her child turn out to be in vain? Would she vanish in to an apocalyptic nuclear cloud with the rest of them?

As if on cue, he appeared. She heard his footsteps first and then the sound of his breathing. She sat for a minute, waiting for him to say something, anything. He didn’t.

She turned in her chair to face him. “Are you going to lurk there and watch me, because, I have to say, it’s positively creepy.”’

He held a letter in his hand. Lix didn’t have to ask what it was. “That was rather quick,’ she said, staring up at him.

He took a seat on the edge of her desk. “When you’ve been doing this as long as I have…” he began.

Lix reached for a cigarette and lit it. “Well?” she asked.

“My man, he thinks he’s found her.”

She cleared her throat in an attempt to stifle her emotion. “Where?”

“He thinks she’s in Paris, studying music at Conservatory.”  
She couldn’t help a tiny smile from crossing her lips. “Good then. It’s good that it’s sorted.”

“However—“

Lix cut him off. It was enough. They knew she was alive. Why couldn’t he leave it at that? “What?”

“We have to go to the embassy to be check the records to be certain. I want to be certain.”

She turned back to her typewriter, not to work, if only to attempt not losing her temper.

Randall put his hand over the keys. “Lix, look at me,” he said. She reluctantly gazed up into his brown eyes.

“Please? I’ve rung them and they’ve pulled the records. We can go this afternoon.”

Lix leaned back in her chair. She could fight it, the voice in her head silently agreeing with him. Yes, they should be certain, if only it would help them to move on. They had been forced together in a situation that was unchangeable and the only way to exist within it was to be able to truly put the past behind them.

“OK,” she said.

He took his hand off of her typewriter. “Meet me in the lobby at 2.”

*****  
She had hoped that no one would notice her ducking out of the office. But even in the swirling chaos of the newsroom, the absence of a woman who seemed to never leave was conspicuous.

Bel snagged her in the hallway. “Where are you off to?”

“An appointment,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I shouldn’t be more than an hour at best.”

Bel caught sight of Freddie and dashed off, without giving Lix a second thought.

Randall was already waiting in the lobby. Lix looked around carefully. She didn’t want to be spotted going out with the news director in the middle of the day. It would only fuel the gossip that she and Randall most definitely had a past.

He took her arm and she quickly shrugged it off. “Let’s just go if we’re going to go.”

Silence prevailed during the car ride. Neither had any idea what to say. To make small talk seemed inappropriate on their way to something as important as this. But both knew that to talk about what they were about to do was just as inappropriate.

A polite woman at the embassy ushered them into her office. “Please take a seat, Mr. and Mrs. Brown.”

Lix rolled her eyes at Randall.

“Just play along,” he muttered under his breath.

The woman sat down at her desk and opened a file. “Let’s see here. You’ve made an inquiry into a young woman named Sophia Malfrand?” She flipped through the file. “Yes, yes. The record matches with what you’ve told me, Mr. Brown. Sofia is 19 and studying music at Conservatory in Paris.”

Randall exhaled with relief and a smile even began to creep into the corners of his mouth. But Lix was sitting closer to the desk and could read the file. “No, no,” she said. She pointed to the birthdate on the file. “Our daughter was born on the 24th of June, 1938. This says July. She was born in June. This is wrong, the name of the family—Malfrande. The family I left her with, there was no ‘e’ at the end of ‘Malfrand’.”

Randall leaned in to look at the file. “Perhaps it’s a clerical error,” he said.

“No, Randall. I remember when my…our daughter was born. It was the 24th of June 1938 in Barcelona, just as the birth certificate says. I took her to Paris after…” her voice trailed off.

“Maybe you misunderstood the French spelling of the name?” the woman asked.

“I assure you I didn’t. I’m quite fluent in French. Est-ce que cela vous dérangerait de réaliser votre travail? ”

“No, no,” the woman answered, flustered. “If you give me a few minutes, I can go check into some other files. Would you prefer to come back?”

“No,” Lix stated emphatically. “We’ll wait”

The woman left the office, leaving Lix and Randall alone with a tension that, if it had been simmering before, was ready to boil over.

“Lix,” Randall said as he tried to take her hand.  
She pulled away from him. “You were the one who wanted to be certain, so let’s be damned certain!” She immediately realized she was shouting and lowered her voice. “You came back for this, so don’t tell me you’d be satisfied to walk away now.”

She rummaged into her purse for her packet of cigarettes and lighter. With trembling hands, she managed to light one. However, there wasn’t an ashtray in sight. To hell with it. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long legs, looking around the room, refusing to make eye contact with Randall.

After what seemed like hours, the woman returned with another file. The expression on her face foretold what was to follow.

The woman placed the file on the desk. She made a great effort in smoothing her skirt before sitting down. She moved some other papers around on her desk and seemed to be afraid to make eye contact with either of them.

“Well?” Randall asked, his voice beginning to crack.

The woman opened the folder and turned it around to show them. “I am so sorry for the mistake, so, so sorry…there was a clerical error…”

Lix felt her heart begin to plummet through her body.

“Sofia Malfrand, no ‘e’, born June 24th, 1938…declared dead with her family after an air raid…”

The rest was noise. Lix could see Randall speaking but she couldn’t hear him. The room seemed to be tilting off its axis. She felt Randall’s grip on her arm. “Let’s go, he said.”

“I can’t…I can’t move,” She whispered. The Lix that was made of iron was gone, shattered into pieces of raw emotion. The primal urge to scream overwhelmed her, but no noise escaped her throat.

Randall summoned his own strength and gently pulled Lix up from the chair. He put his arm around her and led her from the building. He stood on the sidewalk and for a moment, had no sense of direction. Then he moved them the only way he could.

Forward.


	3. Chapter 3

It was a tiny, smoky, dimly lit pub. The dark wood paneling made it worse. Once inside, one could not be sure what time of day it was. It didn’t matter. It was the closest place to the embassy that served alcohol and it had been desperately needed at the time. He had directed Lix to a table in the back. By this time she seemed able to carry herself because she was able to pull out the chair by herself and sit down. While he went to the bar to procure a bottle of whisky and two glasses, she shrugged out of her coat, took her cigarettes out of her purse and tossed them on to the table.

Randall returned to the table, placed a glass in front of her and poured a generous portion. He sat down in the booth across the small table from her, and then proceeded to serve himself. He stood up, took off his overcoat, hung it on a nearby hook and hung his hat neatly on top of it. He gave it an extra touch, to make sure it was just so.

His daughter was dead. But his coat would not be wrinkled.

He took his seat again. Lix had since emptied her glass. He poured again. Her brilliant blue eyes were wet and she was staring off into a distant point in space. He was afraid to speak. He didn’t know what to say. Her tears were precariously close to falling and he knew how she hated appearing vulnerable, let alone vulnerable in public. Never mind that it was midday and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen patrons including the bartender.

So they sat in silence. It hung painfully between them. There was nowhere to go with the pain.

Finally, Lix spoke. “Damn you Randall,” she said in a low, gravelly voice. “Why? Why did you have to come here and wake me up, give me…hope?” She looked at him and then she looked away. She reached into her purse again and pulled out the photo, the only living representation of their daughter. It had been in the envelope, but she had slipped it out when Randall had put the envelope on the desk at the embassy.

“She looked so right with them, you know?” Lix’s voice trembled slightly. “They had a little boy and they lived on a little farm about an hour outside of Paris. I always thought that children should grow up with siblings and fresh air and room to run about. It seemed so…safe…” She stared at the photograph and touched Sophia’s face gently with her fingertips. “They said she had my eyes.” Lix smiled a bit. “Everyone said that.”

She put the photo on the table and lit another cigarette. She emptied her glass and put it down on the table with a bit of force, as if to defend her next statement. “I went back for her, you know, when the bombing started. But the town was nearly deserted and the one woman I spoke to hadn’t seen the family in days. She assumed they had gone someplace…safer.” Lix chuckled softly at the irony. “They were probably underground, hiding at that very moment.”

She looked across the table at Randall and even in the dim light; she saw something that she had not seen in a long time. Randall was breaking. His normally stoic expression was softening and tears were forming in his eyes.

No, no, no. She would not let him fall apart because if he did, she was sure she couldn’t put the pieces back together. She was barely holding herself together. They had to go back to the newsroom and work. They had to go on functioning as if they weren’t suffering from a wound she had inflicted upon them.

She stubbed out her cigarette, got up and sat next to him. She took his hand and placed it on her leg and laced her fingers through his. He took a relaxing breath and she moved closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder. It felt so familiar, so right, when everything else was so terribly wrong. They had to be strong together if they were going to truly grieve for their daughter and move on.

They sat together that way for hours. Damn the nuclear apocalypse.

*****  
It was dark by the time they returned to Lime Grove. Randall slipped into his office as if to pretend he had been there all afternoon. Lix walked through the newsroom to her office as if she had simply been out for a stroll and not spent the afternoon having her soul torn apart.

“Your absence was conspicuous by the way,” Bel said as she leaned against the doorframe. She gave Lix a look.

“It was nothing. I had lunch with an old friend and it ran late. No intrigue here.”

Bel laughed.

“Anyway, I thought you and Freddie were madly chasing this Kiki Delaine, the woman who claims Hector beat her?”

Lix walked back out into the newsroom and Bel followed. “That’s the thing. Freddie did get hold of Miss Delaine, but she was quite uncooperative, as you can imagine. Something incredibly sinister is going on at that club.”

“If there is a story, Freddie will get it in his teeth and won’t let go until someone is tarred and feathered on national television for their crimes,” Lix said.

“It’s possessed me too, I’m afraid. I’m going back to the club tomorrow, to try and talk with one of the girls. Freddie slipped her his card and she seemed like she might talk. Sofia, he said, was her name. Maybe if a woman approaches her she’ll be less afraid,” Bel said.  
“What did you say her name was?” Lix asked before she could think. Why would she be interested in the girl’s name of all things?

“Her name is Sophia. Why?” Bel looked at her curiously.

“Lovely name, that’s all.” Lix shrugged her shoulders and walked away.


	4. Chapter 4

Paris, 1950

A dancer. A ballet dancer. She’d had the aptitude.

“Elle a tellement le talent! Elle dansera avec le ballet de Paris en un rien de temps!”

She’d been living with Madame Marchand in Paris for some years. Her journey had been circuitous but she had landed in the loving embrace of this woman. She too, had lost her family in the war and now Madame Marchand always said that they were each other’s family.

After the horrors of the war, Paris was rebuilding again. Madame Marchand had been a dancer in her youth and was now making her living teaching dance lessons. Business wasn’t booming, but it was a living and it gave her the chance to watch her beautiful angel flourish.

At nearly 12, Sophie Marchand, as she was called now, was strikingly beautiful. Dark, curly hair cascaded past her shoulders. Her skin was porcelain with a few freckles sprinkled across her cheeks. Her eyes were of the most brilliant blue and framed with dark feathery lashes. Her limbs were long and graceful and it seemed as though her legs began at her shoulders.

She was so graceful. She floated through her dances as if it was what she had been born to do. Smart as a whip, she moved through her school studies just as effortlessly. A wicked sense of humor made her very popular there as well.

Madame Marchand thought it miraculous Sophie could be so well adjusted after what she had been through in her formative years. Ever since she’d been found as a three year old, wandering through the town not far from her family’s burned out home. Sophie had been fortunate to wander into the arms of Madame Marchand’s brother and his family. They knew her, knew the family and knew how she had come to be with the Malfrand’s. They felt they’d owed it to the Malfrand’s to take the girl in. But times were lean enough during the war and they could barely feed their own children.

Thus began a five year journey, where she was shuttled from friend to relative to relative to finally Madame Marchand. Amazing as it sounds, the little girl’s story followed her at every stop along the way.

“She was left behind by a woman…”

But the war was over. It was 1950 and Madame Marchand filled Sophie’s heart with so much love that, even though she knew her own story of “the little girl left behind”, Sofia never thought about it.

A dancer. It was all she wanted to be. She could not imagine anything else.

She could have also never imagined that a few years later her brilliant world would turn very dark.

Sophie had just passed her 15th birthday when, one evening, she came home to find Madame Marchand collapsed on the kitchen floor. Her heart, the one that had poured so much love into Sophie, had simply given out.

This time there was no one to take in the “little girl left behind”. Madame Marchand had no family and had left no will. Sophie was to become a ward of the state, sent to live in an orphanage until her 18th birthday.

Sophie ran away that night, from heaven to hell. It was the night the brilliant light in her eyes began to die.

Sophie Marchand, the former Sophia Malfrand, became “Sophia Bleu”. She became a dancer, but not on the revered Paris stage. Under layers of makeup and flimsy costumes, she danced for men in a cabaret. The debasing of all the beautiful dancing she had learned was not the horror of it. The owner of the cabaret “ran girls”. Sophia had no idea what that meant until she was forced to entertain a businessman in a small room above the cabaret.

She was chattel, easily bought and sold. When she was 17, she and a few other girls were taken by a seedy looking Englishman to London to work as dancers.

Dancers. If Madame Marchand could see her now, she would be rolling in her grave. Sophia had to stop thinking about it, just as she had put that awful day the bomb had killed her family behind her. If she didn’t, it would break whatever spirit she had left. One night in the dressing room at El Paradis, Sophia took the only photograph she had of her and Madame Marchand and set it on fire. She watched as it slowly burned to ashes in the trash bin.

That life, the life where she had been loved and adored, had been reduced to ashes.


	5. Chapter 5

Lix didn’t dare go back to her flat that night. After the office had emptied for the evening, she closed the door to her office, pulled out her familiar cot, blanket and pillow and made an attempt at sleep.

After the days’ emotional upheaval, it was impossible. She got up and sat down at her desk, attempted to work but focus was just as elusive.

Lix found herself wandering around the newsroom, peeping in on the various things pinned around everyone’s desks. Freddie’s was what she imagined the inside of his head looked like. There were clippings on top of photos on top of clippings; all arranged in a way that only made sense to him.

She didn’t know what possessed her to wander into Bel’s office. She chuckled softly at the bright yellow lamp on the desk. It had been a gift from Freddie and it was the only spot of color in the otherwise drab office. Bel had a board of clippings and photos but hers was slightly more ordered than Freddie’s.

Lix stood for a while and stared at it. Then her eyes tried to focus on one photograph. She quickly turned on the light and pulled the photo off the board. She held it up to the light and examined it carefully. There was something about the young woman, something familiar. She turned it over and her heart stopped.

“Sophia Bleu” was scrawled on the back.

She turned it over again. The young woman had light, heavily made-up eyes and dark, curly hair pinned up in a large hairdo. She was sitting provocatively in the lap of a middle aged man.

No.

Lix quickly returned the photo to the board, turned off the light and went back to her office. She turned off the light and stood with her back against the door, breathing heavily.

No.

Sophia…her Sophia was dead, long dead.

She refused to believe—could not believe anything different.

*****  
It would be a bold thing to do, so unlike her. Not that she wasn’t bold, but to interfere with someone else’s work on a story, especially one as high profile as this, broke an unwritten code. Unless another journalist asked for help, you never poached their leads.

Bloody hell, she worked the foreign desk! She was supposed to be reporting on the nuclear threat and the Americans trying to park their missiles in Britain at the expense of the British taxpayers. The police corruption story was big and would no doubt require all hands on deck in the coming weeks; right now this wasn’t her story.

Lix was convinced that she had taken leave of her senses. She didn’t do things like this. She was calm and level headed. She didn’t run off half-cocked on a ridiculous notion. It was an entirely ridiculous notion. It was a gut feeling that flew in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Freddie was obsessed with Kiki Delaine and getting to the truth about why she had falsely accused Hector of assaulting her. Both he and Bel were convinced that something much more sinister was brewing at El Paradis and that Mr. Cilenti, the club’s owner was in it up to his neck. But they needed proof and since Miss Delaine was proving elusive, their next best hope was to get one of the other girls from the club to talk.

Freddie had struck out with the girl named Sophia. But while he had been tiptoeing around the dressing room on his last visit, he’s snagged a photo off of a mirror. It was a photo of the girl, perched in the lap of a man. He had swiped it and scrawled her name on the back, thinking it might prove useful. After talking with Bel, she had agreed to go back to the club and make another attempt to talk to the girl. Perhaps a softer approach was in order.

Bel was going to the club today, but the question was one of timing. While trying to work this story, Bel was also caught up with Bill Kendal, the man from ITV’s new program, “Uncovered”, who was simultaneously trying to seduce her and poach Hector. He was turning up nearly every day and it was only a matter of time before he did today.

Lix watched the clock and bided her time. Finally, she spotted Mr. Kendal and Bel in the hallway, going into Randal’s office.

She slipped out of the building. What was she doing? Halfway there she almost told the cab driver to stop and turn around. What was she going to say? If it was really her Sofia, what would she do, waltz in and introduce herself? “Hello, I think I may be your Mother?” Beyond that, there was the good chance of an encounter with Cilenti or one of his men, which would not only endanger the girl, but blow the story. Bel and Freddie would be furious and Randall…she could already feel his anger.

The cab let her off near the service entrance and she prepared herself to slip in without drawing attention.

She didn’t have to.

Lix saw the young woman standing by the door. She was wearing a floral dressing gown and high-heeled fur trimmed slippers. Her face was naked of heavy makeup and her hair was tied back with a scarf.

Lix took a breath and nonchalantly approached the girl.

“I’m sorry, could I trouble a light?”

Lix produced a cigarette from her purse. The girl stared Lix up and down silently.

Her eyes…

“Sure.” The girl pulled a lighter from the pocket of her robe and handed it to Lix. Lix lit her cigarette and handed the lighter back.

The girl continued to stare at her with piercing blue eyes. “Who are you and what do you want?” she asked.

Her English wasn’t broken, but it was thick with a French accent. Lix doubted she’d been speaking English for very long, only fueling her suspicions. If Sofia had lived, she had probably spent her whole life in France, speaking nothing but French.

“I was here last night and I think I left my purse. I was hoping I could go in and have a look or someone inside could?”

“You mean the purse you have under your arm?”

“No, it was an evening purse, black satin.”

The girl had finished her cigarette and lit another. “Try again,” she said.

It had been a bad cover from the start and now it was blown. Had she seriously thought that having a chat about a bag would tell her everything she needed to know?

“A friend of mine told me I could find a woman named Sophia here.”

“A friend?” Her blue eyes narrowed. “This friend wouldn’t be a skinny man who works for a TV show?”

“Freddie Lyon.”

The girl’s eyes went wide. “I can’t talk to you! They’ll kill me! You don’t know!” She turned quickly to leave.

Lix reacted. She gently grabbed hold of the girl’s arm. The girl turned back.

“What I have to ask you has nothing to do with Miss Delaine.”

The girl looked confused. Lix decided there was only one way she could prove it to her.

“Sofia est votre nom?”

The girl was caught off guard. She hesitated. “Oui.”

“Votre nom est Sophia Malfrand?”

The expression on her face clearly revealed her identity.

“Mon nom est Sophia Bleu!” She was emphatic.

Lix was running out of time. “Quand est-ce que vous un enfant, vous avaient-ils lieu a vécu à une ferme?”

She could feel her trembling. Her face was full of panic.

“Avez-vous un frère appelé Pierre?” Lix pressed on.

The words were a dagger in Sofia’s heart. She pulled away from Lix. “Jamais non ici revenu encore!” she cried and ran inside.

Alexis Storm’s heart pounded in her chest. She wanted to chase after the girl she was certain was her daughter. But her shoes were fixed to the concrete. Just when she thought the situation could not get any worse, she heard a voice behind her.”

“Lix?”

It was Bel.

She turned around.

“Lix, what in the bloody hell are you doing here?”

Lix took a deep breath. “We need to talk.”


	6. Chapter 6

Sophia Bleu sat in front of the mirror and closed her eyes. Why? Why now? With every day that passed she had tried to forget those earliest of memories forever seared onto her conscience. The memories were not of her parents, or her brother, or of the beautiful farm where she had lived with them. No, the memories were of the sound of warplanes droning overhead and the distant boom of bombs in the distance. The sounds grew louder, ever closer by the day.

There were the sounds of Mama and Papa frantically herding her and her older brother Pierre into the cellar. Small bits of gravel shaking loose from the earthen walls with the vibration and hitting the floor. There was Papa striking the match to light the small kerosene lamp, then blowing the lamp out in order to ration the kerosene. There was the muffled gnawing on bread and, when the bread ran out, the audible gnawing of their empty stomachs.

A three year old has no firm sense of time but it seemed like forever until Papa decided they should leave the cellar. There was much arguing back and forth between him and Mama. But Sofia remembers exactly what he said.

“I will not die buried underground like some trapped, starving animal!”

It was the last decision he ever made and would change the course of her life forever. Not long after they returned to the house, they were gathered at the kitchen table eating breakfast. The droning began but instead of fading into the distance, it grew closer and the noise was deafening. She covered her tiny ears and cried, not knowing what was happening but feeling terribly frightened.

“Please protect her,” the tall dark-haired woman with the striking blue eyes had said before placing a gentle kiss on the baby’s soft curls.

Suddenly Mama shoved had shoved her under the table. Minutes later, the house had exploded into a pile of rubble and ash. Sofia cried as it crashed down onto the table above her. She coughed, the dust choking her nose and throat. She closed her burning eyes and curled up in fear, waiting for Mama or Papa, or even Pierre to save her.

But no one came.

Sophia shook her head as if she could shake off the horrible memories that followed. But as she opened her eyes and looked into the mirror of her dressing table at El Paradis, the pieces came flooding back.

She couldn’t remember how long she was under the table. It was dark, then light, then dark, then light again perhaps, and terribly quiet. She crawled out. Mama, Papa and Pierre wouldn’t move no matter how much she cried and tried to shake them. They were covered with something red and sticky that also covered her hands and clothes. She had realized it was blood, remembering the time Mama had cut herself chopping carrots. She had crawled out of the destroyed house and wandered out into the bright sunlight. She had wandered as only a small child does, disoriented and with no sense of direction.

Sophia lowered her head and wiped a tear that had escaped down her cheek, smudging her carefully applied makeup.

An angry voice broke through her thoughts.

“Sophia, move your arse! You’re on in 15!” shouted one of Cilenti’s dogs.

She lifted her head and reached for a tissue. She carefully daubed her eyes and took up a brush to fix her makeup.

The show must go on—always. Or whatever life she had would not go on. She was disposable.  
They all were.


	7. Chapter 7

The people in Bel’s office didn’t have to worry about a nuclear bomb randomly falling from a Soviet rocket.

One had just detonated in the room. It had been less of a conversation and more of a pouring out of Lix’s soul. For Bel and Freddie, it wasn’t so much the story, but how vulnerable Lix seemed. Lix was made of steel. She was their rock of sanity and now that rock was coming to pieces before their eyes.

As difficult as it was to witness, it was refreshing in a way. Bel and Freddie were emotional beings, prone to meltdowns. It was what made them human. It wasn’t disappointing to find that Lix was just as human as the rest of them. But it didn’t make the potential fallout from the situation less scary. If they had thought the consequences of putting the piece on the air were a matter of life and death, the stakes had just been upped 100 fold.

Bel had sat down behind her desk. Freddie was sitting on the edge of it. Lix had shrugged out of her coat and was sitting across from Bel. They were silently, intently smoking cigarettes and wondering what to say next.

All except Randall, who was standing stock still, face hardened. Finally he cleared his throat. “Lix, we need to speak…privately,” he said softly.

But underneath, Lix could feel the undercurrent of rage in his tone. She should have gone to him first and she knew it. Had she not run into Bel at the club, she would have.

Lix got up, opened the door and walked down the hall to his office. Randall excused himself and followed, leaving Bel and Freddie speechless.

*****

He closed his office door. Lix stood, waiting for him to speak. Instead, he went to his desk and started arranging and rearranging things. That was his way to make order out of chaos, to control what he could, down to the placement of the smallest paper clip on his desk.

“Randall, we can’t use her. Cilenti probably already knows she’s talking and it’s only a matter of time before she ends up dead in an alley.”

He said nothing, continuing to fixate on his desk.

“Randall!” She didn’t shout but her voice was enough to shake him.

“How can you even be sure that it’s her?” He asked.

She wasn’t going to repeat what she had just told him minutes ago. Instead, she tossed the photo onto his desk.

“Look at her. Look at her, dammit! Look at her and tell me—“

“What?” Randall cut her off. “Look at her and tell you that under the garish makeup, she bears a resemblance to you?” He came out from behind the desk and stood to face her. “For someone who didn’t even care to know if she still existed in this world, you’ve certainly obsessed yourself with her! You abandoned our child to become nothing more than a prostitute!”

The knife was in her chest and he was twisting it ever harder. She squared her jaw and took it. She deserved it. She deserved every brutal word.

He stepped back from her and returned to his desk. “I can’t…I can’t…see you right now,” he stammered.

Lix couldn’t look at him without waves of guilt and shame crashing over her, threatening to drown her.

She fled the room and returned to the sanctum of her office. With the door closed, she fumbled for a bottle of whiskey. It took three empties strewn about before she found one in the bottom desk drawer. She poured a generous serving and washed it down, gulping it as if it were oxygen.

But she was a drowning woman.

*****

In Bel’s office, Bel and Freddie were rapidly becoming at odds with each other over the bombshell.

“We can’t use her Freddie. Cilenti has already threatened me and he’s bound to be suspicious of Sophia. We’re putting her in grave danger. If something were to happen to her,” her eyes shot in the direction of Lix’s office, “Could you live with that on your conscience?”

Freddie began to pace. “We’re not 100% sure it’s her,” he said. But even he didn’t believe himself. “Nearly all of these girls are Hispanic or French and smuggled in with either false papers or none at all. It could be why there’s no record of her past.”

“Even if we could get her to talk, who’s to say she has enough proof to put this on the air? If we’re going to go after the Metropolitan Police and Raphael Cilenti on National television, we’d better have enough to lock up the whole bloody lot of them. Otherwise, none of us will be safe.”

“We have Kiki,” Freddie said.

“No. ‘We’ don’t have Kiki. You barely have her.”

“Bel—“

There was a knock at the door.

“What is it, Sissy?”

Sissy made a gesture for them to step outside. “There’s a young woman named Sophia here to see you.”

Bel and Freddie looked and were shocked with what they saw. The Sophia they had seen at the club was not the young woman standing in front of them. She was dressed smartly in a blue coat and black pumps. She wore minimal makeup and long, dark curls spilled past her shoulders, held up only by two combs behind her ears.

It was Lix. It was Lix minus 30 years of cigarettes, war and whiskey. But there was no mistaking that the young woman was definitely Lix’s daughter.

“Sophia, I’m so glad you came to speak with us,” Bel said warmly.

“Don’t be,” she replied. “I’m here to see the woman from the club. She came earlier today.”

“Oh, um…” Bel looked towards Lix’s office.

But Lix had already come out into the bullpen.

Sophia walked towards her. The pair stared at each other in silence.

“You’re her,” Sophia said softly. “You’re the woman who left me behind.”  
*****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **I consider this I halfway point. There will be more to come. A lot of that depends on reads and reviews.  
> Hope you enjoyed!**


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